Symbolic Execution and Heterogeneous Modeling

This paper is devoted to complex system modeling, that is to say modeling recursively systems by interconnecting component models. Our concern is to address the potential heterogeneity induced by the usage of different modeling formalisms for describing different component models involved in a common system. The main difficulty is each modeling language has its own execution and communication semantics (e.g. synchronous, asynchronous, etc.). Therefore, modeling systems in the whole comes to model the way heterogeneous components interact. We propose a formal framework composed of: (a) a design language allowing to capture usual modeling language semantics and to describe rich interaction mechanisms; (b) symbolic execution mechanisms allowing to simulate system model executions for models described in our language. The complete framework allows to symbolically execute heterogeneous system models for formal validation purposes. Symbolic execution mechanisms associate de facto an operational semantics to our language.